Programmer’s Notepad: Advanced Text Editor for Windows

October 22, 2011

Programmer’s Notepad is a very useful tool for software writers who want a simple yet powerful text editor their Windows based computer. Programmer’s Notepad is a Better Notepad.

Are you not satisfied with the regular Notepad that comes with Windows? I am sure you will wish for a better Notepad if you requires advanced features like Find, Replace, Regex, Syntax Highlighting etc.

This year, one of the best software tool I found is Programmer’s Notepad. As the name suggests, it is an editor loaded with features that are useful for people who work with code for software or web pages.

There are lots of such tools available for Linux platform but Windows equivalents have been totally lack-luster. The poor Notepad and Wordpad are no good for programmers. On top of it, both these applications have some encoding related snags in Windows 7 versions. I work a lot with non-English languages and therefore need to use Unicode. On Windows 7, Notepad and Workpad had made my life really miserable because they would not save files in correct encoding. I was craving for a light-weight, simple notepad application that allows me to easily work with CSS, PHP, Java, JavaScript, HTML and what not. Programmer’s Notepad (PN) is a brilliant tool that answers to all these requirements.

Screenshot showing search and replace and list of supported languages

PN is a free and open source software. It is very fast, does syntax highlighting in all the popular programming languages, provides indentation, search and replace using regex AND it can set the encoding of the file / editor window to UTF-8 and UTF-16.

To set the encoding of a file go to: File > Properties

PN can open multiple files in tabbed view, can show line numbers and can manipulate lines with shortcut keys (like vi editor) among other features. You might say that all these features are available in any good IDE –but as I said, I wanted to have a light-weight editor which can quickly load just like Window notepad.

Lalit Kumar is the Principal Author and Founder of TechWelkin. He is a web explorer and he enjoys finding useful information on the Internet. He loves to put things together to create a bigger solution. Lalit is passionate about technology, languages and literature. You can contact Lalit via email (techwelkin [at] gmail [dot] com) or Facebook (facebook.com/techwelkin).